Bernie Sanders spoke in Des Moines, Iowa on Saturday where he issued a rallying cry for “a vibrant American democracy,” and took aim at the Republicans’ healthcare bill, which he called “the most anti-working class legislation” in modern history.

The Vermont senator made the remarks at the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) Action Fund’s annual convention called “Revolution Iowa: From Protest to Power,” where he delivered the keynote address.

Sanders said that “we’re in a pivotal moment of American history.”

he trend toward having a handful of billionaire families with unlimited resources controlling our political process will only get worse. The trend toward a handful of conglomerates owning and controlling our economy will only get worse.”

“And what our job is,” he continued, “is to create a vibrant democracy where one person, one vote is what dominates the political system, not billionaires buying the election.”

“Democracy is facing an enormous challenge,” Sanders said.

Threats to a “vibrant democracy,” he said, come not only from the “disastrous” Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, but also “Republican governors, cowardly governors, who don’t have the guts to run for office based on their ideas but who are attempting to suppress the vote to keep low-income people or people of color or working people or older people from participating in the political process.”

On Saturday, Senator Bernie Sanders made his first visit to Iowa since the 2016 election. This time it wasn’t to campaign, but rather to address concern over President Trump’s proposed budget cuts to healthcare.

“If that Republican bill gets passed, how are they going to get insurance that they can afford?” Sanders asked, addressing the issue in a room full of 1,000 Iowans.

“Healthcare is my issue. I am a person with a mental illness, I’ve got a daughter on SSI and I work in behavioral health. Everyone I work with is on Medicaid Expansion, everyone I work will lose their insurance if this goes through,” said Manchester resident Robin Stone.

While healthcare was a hot topic for attendees, so was reducing the 15 trillion pounds of carbon emissions the EPA says the U.S. omitted last year.

“It’s awesome to be part of an event full of these hardworking and progressive people in the state of Iowa. It means a lot, especially to see Bernie out here, it’s fantastic,” said Cedar Falls resident Benjamin Hanisch.

Two political polar opposites converged Saturday at the Iowa Events Center, speaking at separate events.

Senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told a conservative audience at the annual Family Leadership Summit it’s a “moral imperative” to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s signature 2010 health care law.

Conway encouraged Iowans to engage in government while focusing on Christian values while placing principle over politics.

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Inside the same building complex, former Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, held a rally that marked his first time in Iowa since the election.

He told community organizers at the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund’s convention that the GOP health care bill is “anti-working class legislation.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates at least 22 million more people would be uninsured under Republican legislation.

Sanders said America should join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee health care to all citizens, pointing to neighboring Canada as an example that provides health care to its citizens in a cost-effective way. He also urged Iowa Republican Sens. Joni Ernst and Charles Grassley to reject the proposal.

The last time Sen. Bernie Sanders was in Iowa, there was an election to win. It was November 2016 and Sanders was barnstorming Hawkeye State college towns, trying in vain to drum up support for Hillary Clinton.

He returned on Saturday under slightly different circumstances. President Donald Trump is finishing his sixth month in office and Senate Republicans are hammering away at an Obamacare overhaul that could cause more than 20 million people to lose insurance over the next 10 years. The campaign continues, but this time around it turns on health care — beating back the Senate GOP bill while building up support for the single-payer plan Sanders will likely introduce in August.

Making the first of two scheduled summer visits here, the state that will play host to the first-in-the-nation caucuses of a still far-off presidential campaign season, Sanders kept up his broadsides against the Republican health care overhaul, calling it the most “anti-working class legislation in the history of the country.” He named and tried to shame both of his Senate colleagues from Iowa, pleading with the Republicans repeatedly to reject the bill.

“I say to Sen. Grassley and Sen. Ernst, please, please take a hard look at what this disastrous legislation will do to the people of Iowa and the people of America,” the Vermont senator said. “I beg of them: please vote ‘no’ on this legislation.”

Senator Bernie Sanders addressed the Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual convention on Saturday afternoon, and in a far-ranging speech, he went after the Trump Administration’s push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“Thousands of Americans would unnecessarily die because of this legislation,” Sanders said. “Our job as a nation isn’t to throw 22 million people off of health insurance. Our job is to join every other industrialized nation on earth and offer health care to all people as a right, not a privilege.”

Sanders, who ran for president in 2016 and hasn’t ruled out a run in 2020, renewed his call for a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, and pointed to other countries like Ireland and Germany that have adopted such systems.

“We are the only major country on Earth that allows people to be uninsured, or to have huge deductibles and co-pays,” he said. “Brothers and sisters, let us go forward and fight for a Medicare-for-all single-payer program that guarantees healthcare to all of our people.”

That’s your quick summary of the Vermont congressional delegation’s latest quarterly fundraising reports, which were due Saturday to the Federal Election Commission. (See fundraising totals from state candidates here.)

From April through June, Sanders’ Senate reelection campaign raised nearly $1.3 million — almost entirely in donations of less than $100. It spent a little over $200,000, so the Sanders war chest continued to grow.

In fact, Sanders’ cash-on-hand totaled nearly $4.9 million as of June 30.

That’s got to be a chilling number for any Republican considering a run for U.S. Senate. Sanders, who faces reelection to a third six-year term in 2018, already has an insurmountable lead in fundraising — and he can seemingly produce millions more with a snap of his fingers.

Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic primary, but less than one year later, his progressive platform appears to be winning over the party and, maybe even more importantly, some of its biggest donors.

There were a number of factors that contributed to Sanders losing to Hillary Clinton in last year’s primary, with the relatively small exposure of the Vermont Senator likely the biggest one. But as Sanders’ progressive message continues to gain more visibility, it is winning over some of the key players who will be determining the party’s platform moving forward.

This week, the Democratic Party’s biggest donor, California hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, gave a rousing endorsement of Bernie’s platform. Steyer supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election and gave close to $90 million to Democratic candidates and causes last year, but this year appears to be throwing all of his support behind Sanders’ vision for the future.

In an interview with Mic, Steyer echoed the famous Bernie Sanders stump speech that drew record crowds throughout the 2026 primary.

“There is an absolute, unspoken war between corporate interests and the American people,” he said.

“When people say Bernie is crazy, no. Bernie is talking about inequality. That is the burning issue in the United States.”

That is a message that progressives, and particularly Bernie Sanders supporters, have been trying to drive home with the leadership of the Democratic party since Hillary Clinton’s brutal loss in the 2016 presidential race — often, some have felt, to little avail. But it’s no longer a message coming from outside the establishment: it’s now the opinion of Tom Steyer, the largest donor to the Democratic party.

Mic recently caught up with Steyer, a California hedge fund billionaire who spent a whopping $87 million on Democratic candidates and causes in 2016 and endorsed Clinton after the primaries, to discuss the state of play for Democrats in the Trump era — the good, bad and yes, the ugly. Today, Steyer is an unabashed supporter of Sanders’ progressive vision.

There is an absolute, unspoken war between corporate interests and the American people,” he said. “That’s the underlying subtext for all of the public discussions within the Democratic party.”

“We’re seeing a deliberate attempt to take away [working families’] future by really rich people. Until we address that, I don’t think we’re dealing with the reality Americans are facing today,” he continued

I’m taking this guy with a grain of salt right now. It is true that if Single Payer/Medicare for All passes, big biz will make out like bandits in the long term cos of cost reductions. Warren Buffet has been pointing that fact out for years.

These should be called ‘establishment wishful thinking headlines’ (or more accurately… ‘agenda headlines’). Much like all the headlines about Bernie’s ‘challenger’ who besides his horrible history of statements on various issues.. has not even filed any paperwork to run in any election (unlike Paul Ryan’s actual challenger Cathy Myers who gets nearly zero articles written about her).

The common theme is that headlines are stronger than any content if not downright contradicted by it all-together.

Stalwart liberal state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. is planning to launch his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor Monday — heralding a contest for the party’s progressive base.

Madaleno told The Baltimore Sun he would be the first Montgomery countian, the first Italian-American and the first openly gay person to be elected governor of Maryland. He plans to announce his candidacy at Shady Grove in Montgomery County in the morning, then travel to Baltimore for an afternoon roundtable with community leaders.

The veteran lawmaker’s entry into the race swells an already crowded field of Democrats seeking to oust popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. Madaleno, 52, has been a consistent critic of Hogan from the day the governor was sworn in.

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Madaleno’s entry will make five announced Democratic candidates for governor. The others are Prince George’s County Executive Rushern L. Baker III; former NAACP President Ben Jealous, Baltimore lawyer Jim Shea and high-tech entrepreneur Alec Ross.

Mileah Kromer, director of the Sarah T. Hughes Field Politics Center at Goucher College, said Madaleno will contend with Jealous for the support of the most progressive Democrats — many of whom lined up behind Del. Heather Mizeur in 2014. Jealous scored a coup in that effort last week when he was endorsed by former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Jealous had supported Sanders in the 2016 race.

Madaleno supported Hillary Clinton in that contest, but Kromer said he still a powerful argument to make to left-leaning Democrats. While Jealous has been a formidable national figure, Madaleno is steeped in Maryland politics.

Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan has built a massive chest for his 2018 reelection, with his joint fundraising committee announcing this week that it raised $10.5 million in the second quarter. It’s five times as much as some Senate candidates. And it’s 20 times as much money as Randy Bryce, the ironworker and union organizer running against Ryan, has raised since launching his bid last month.

That hasn’t stopped Bryce, who tweets as “@ironstache,” from settling into a role as a progressive cause celebre. His $550,000-plus fundraising haul is larger than most first-time candidates and enough to run a real campaign. This week, the Working Families Party gave Bryce its first federal endorsement for the 2018 cycle; Wisconsin’s branch of the party had urged Bryce to run in the first place; later this month Bryce heads to heads to New York, where the party was founded, for a $50-per-head fundraiser. The argument, everywhere, is that Ryan’s southeast Wisconsin district truly was winnable.

“Obama won this district in 2008, and Ryan couldn’t win his own neighborhood in 2012,” said Bryce in an interview. “Paul Ryan won’t even come back and tell us how this health bill is going to affect us.”

Wall Street analysts tell us that Amazon’s $14 billion buyout of Whole Foods isn’t only a win-win for both of them, but also for consumers, for Amazon intends to lower the organic grocer’s prices.

Really? Yes, they say, because Amazon will use its amazing computer-driven tactics to cut Whole Foods’ cost of selling groceries.

But Amazon’s robotic “efficiency” is achieved by cutting people. It ruthlessly squeezes suppliers, for example, demanding that they give bankruptcy-level wholesale prices to the retail colossus.

That means that small organic farmers and food artisans are destined to be squeezed out of Whole Foods, displaced by deep-pocket, global food makers who are willing to cut corners on quality and the environment in order to get on Amazon’s new grocery shelves.

Next on the chopping block is Whole Foods’ helpful and friendly work force. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, doesn’t view workers as assets, but as costs. So to jack up the grocery chain’s profits, he’ll cut those “costs”—aka, people.

The seminal fight for single-payer healthcare in California reflects a national struggle for the movement for social change. So, no, organized nurses and our allies will not wait. And we will not back down.

In case you haven’t noticed, the United States is a country deeply divided on a large number of basic issues: racial issues, gender issues, issues of sexual preference, the role of government in society, the role of religious views in shaping laws, and so on. Influential Institutions, such as media outlets, are being labeled as “left” or “right” depending on how they report or relate on these issues.

Trump now has a 36% approval rating, down six points from his first 100 days’ rating. The poll found that 48% believed America’s leadership in the world is weaker than before the billionaire took office, while support for Republican plans to replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was at just 24% compared with 50% who support the former president’s signature healthcare policy.

’70 Year Low As Health Care Bill Looms’ would be a better headline IMO

Donald Trump’s tax reform plans would, if enacted, increase the gap between rich and poor Americans and see the US slip below Greece on a new global index of inequality.

According to the Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) index, developed by researchers at Oxfam and Development Finance International, the US already distinguishes itself among wealthy countries by doing “very badly” at addressing inequality.

But it would fall a further six places from its ranking of 23rd overall if Trump’s tax reform effort is successful, with the US’s specific rating on tax policies plummeting 33 places from 26th to 59th – just below Peru, Chile and Sri Lanka.

“When you already have countries like Portugal and Slovenia ranking higher than the United States on the overall index, we think that’s a concern considering the wealth of the US,” Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s vice-president for policy and campaigns, told the Guardian.

If the White House passes its budget, which would slash social service spending and could leave millions of Americans without health insurance, the US would fall behind Greece, which is crippled by a debt crisis; Spain, which for 10 months in 2016 did not have a government; and Argentina, which has been plagued by high inflation, according to the report.

Much like the GOP’s health care reform, Trump’s tax cut proposal is not popular. A Politico-Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health survey found that 62 percent of respondents said they are against the plan, while 24 percent back it. (Republicans were split, with 40 percent supporting the proposal and 41 percent opposed.) Most respondents said the tax plan would not help the economy.

South Korea has offered to hold rare military talks with the North to ease tensions after Pyongyang’s first intercontinental ballistic missile test earlier this month.

Monday’s offer, the first since South Korea elected the moderate Moon Jae-In as president, came as the Red Cross in Seoul proposed a separate meeting to discuss the reunion of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean war.

The South’s defence ministry proposed a meeting on Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom, while the Red Cross offered to hold talks on 1 August at the same venue.

If the government meeting goes ahead, it will be the first official inter-Korea talks since December 2015. Moon’s conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye, had refused to engage in substantive dialogue with Pyongyang unless the isolated regime made a tangible commitment to denuclearisation.

In his committed mendacity, his nostalgia for the 1930s, and his acceptance of support from a foreign enemy of the United States, a Republican president has closed the door on conservatism and opened the way to a darker form of politics: a new right to replace an old one.

Less than two months after failing to pass a “bathroom bill” restricting access for transgender people, Texas lawmakers are trying again amid fierce opposition from Democrats, civil rights groups and leading businesses.

A special legislative session will start on Tuesday in Austin. Among the main items on the agenda is a measure to limit transgender access to restrooms and changing facilities. The issue is the latest battleground in the conflict in Texas between moderate, pragmatic Republicans and far-right, ideologically driven conservatives emboldened by the rise of Donald Trump.

That clash is embodied by antipathy between two of the state’s most important politicians: Joe Straus, speaker of the House and a relative moderate, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Christian conservative who was the state chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Passing a bathroom bill is a top priority for Patrick. In a sign of the pressure being placed on moderates as Texas politics lurches even farther rightwards, the GOP in Straus’s home county last week passed a resolution calling for him to be replaced as speaker, in protest at his lack of enthusiasm for a bathroom bill.

A reported conversation between Straus and a state senator friendly to Patrick was recounted in the New Yorker, which quoted Straus as saying he was “disgusted by all this. Tell the lieutenant governor I don’t want the suicide of a single Texan on my hands.”

The United Arab Emirates orchestrated the hacking of Qatari government news and social media sites in order to post incendiary false quotes attributed to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in late May that sparked the ongoing upheaval between Qatar and its neighbors, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

A group of Native American tribes have said they will continue to uphold the Paris Climate Change Agreement despite Donald Trump’s withdrawal from it earlier this year.

Four Native American nations across three US states have joined together to “aggressively address climate change” after the federal government announced it would withdraw from the agreement, signed in December 2015.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Quinault Indian Nation, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Tribes of Alaska said they would work together to protect the environment in their respective territories and to promote the cause in the rest of the US.

﻿ Jared Kushner has been busy, and not only with the Russians. This week, amid the hoopla surrounding his meeting with a Moscow lawyer about the 2016 election, the The New York Times published an intriguing story about his role in a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

Last Saturday, Trump adviser in chief Stephen Bannon, with Kushner’s backing, went to the Pentagon to arrange a discussion between Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and “two businessmen who profited from military contracting,” the Times reported. These weren’t ordinary contractors: They were Erik Prince, the notorious founder of Blackwater, the all-purpose mercenary army, and Stephen Feinberg, a New York financier who owns and controls DynCorp International, the largest US contractor in Afghanistan.

At the meeting (which neither Prince and Feinberg would confirm), they urged the Pentagon to turn the war over to what they call “private military units” who would fight for profit as an alternative to the Pentagon’s recent proposal to send thousands more US military troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. To their apparent disappointment, Mattis, the Times reported, “listened politely” to their audacious proposal, but “declined to include the outside strategies” in a review of Afghanistan policy that is being led in the White House by Trump’s national-security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she is “returning” the Office for Civil Rights “to its role as a neutral, impartial, investigative agency.”

In a July 11 letter to Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, DeVos asserted that the department’s civil rights arm under the Obama administration “had descended into a pattern of overreaching, of setting out to punish and embarrass institutions rather than work with them to correct civil rights violations and of ignoring public input prior to issuing new rules.”

As part of the changes she is implementing, the civil rights office would no longer issue “new regulations via administrative fiat,” as the Obama administration did, she wrote.

DeVos’ letter, which lays out a far less activist philosophy for the civil rights office, came in response to a letter sent late last month by 34 Senate Democrats, who blasted her for a series of actions they said had “diminished” civil rights enforcement. The lawmakers asked DeVos for a host of information by July 11, including a list of civil rights investigations that have been closed or dismissed since the Trump administration began. DeVos didn’t provide any of the information in her response.

That so, Bets? Just how much do we taxpayers have to ante up to protect your worthless hide when you show up at a school? How about getting your bro Eric to protect you? Shouldn’t cost a cent–all in the family, y’know. I detest these FRightwingnuts with every nano-particle in my being!!!!!

Shortly before the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is set to have its first meeting on Wednesday July 19—which will be livestreamed here—the controversial committee published hundreds of pages from concerned citizens about the group’s work. In some cases, the White House released citizens’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses, seemingly without their knowledge.

However, a spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the group, indicated that releasing such personal information was ok.

“These are public comments, similar to individuals appearing before commission to make comments and providing name before making comments,” Marc Lotter, press secretary to the vice president, told Vox on Friday. “The Commission’s Federal Register notice asking for public comments and its website make clear that information ‘including names and contact information’ sent to this email address may be released.”

I’m finishing up Al Franken’s Giant of the Senate. One very interesting fact: the Clintons did try to help Franken in his inaugural campaign. Who avoided him like the Plague? Barack Obama and his organization. Go figure??

A new ‘national security’ advocacy group has sprung up called Alliance for Securing Democracy. It basically looks like a marriage between Obama/Clinton people and neocons for the purpose of working against Russia and Iran. Be on the lookout for their machinations.

One of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country’s most extreme and discredited neocons. While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president.

In sum — just as was true of the first Cold War, when neocons made their home among the Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party — on the key foreign policy controversies, there is now little to no daylight between leading Democratic Party foreign policy gurus and the Bush-era neocons who had wallowed in disgrace following the debacle of Iraq and the broader abuses of the war on terror. That’s why they are able so comfortably to unify this way in support of common foreign policy objectives and beliefs.

That leading Democratic Party foreign policy officials are willing to form new Beltway advocacy groups in collaboration with Bill Kristol, Mike Rogers, and Mike Chertoff, join arms with those who caused the invasion of Iraq and tried to launch a bombing campaign against Tehran, has repercussions that will easily survive the Trump presidency.